According to recent article in Variety, the Times is actively searching for a new media columnist to replace the recently deceased David Carr, and has put together a list of leading candidates that includes Jonathan Mahler (a Times writer and the author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning), David Folkenflik of NPR, and Sarah Ellison, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. Meanwhile, Matthew Kassel at the Observer has put together a list of seventeen more writers he thinks would do a good job.
Jillian Goodman, an associate editor at Fast Company, has started a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for Mary Review, which she says will be a magazine created "by women, for everyone." "Mary will be written by women, edited by women, photographed by women, laid out by women, designed by women, but not for women or about women solely," says Goodman, 28, in a video.
The Wall Street Journal interviews Tunisian author Shukri Mabkhout, whose novel The Italian recently won the International Prize for Arab Fiction. Mabkhout says that he was inspired to write the book after the deposition of Tunisian ruler Zine El Abedine Ben Ali.
Paul Ford—a former Harper’s editor, an onlineprankster, and the author of Gary Benchley: Rock Star—has been hired as a contributing editor at The New Republic, for which he will write a monthly column focusing on technology.
The poet Franz Wright, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for his collection Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, died late last week, at age sixty-two. According to the the New York Times obituary, a teenage Franz mailed his first poem to his father James Wright, who also won the Pulitzer for poetry. “I’ll be damned,” the elder Wright responded. “You’re a poet. Welcome to hell.”
